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One year ago this week, the world changed.
Or perhaps, to be more accurate, the world did what the world does and I changed.
Maybe both.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the past year summed up in six words:

Breathe Deep ~
Take care of yourself. Breathe. Move and feel what’s happening in your body. Eat well. Drink water. Sleep. Take a break when you need to. You can’t do what you need to do if you are running on empty, stressed, and overwhelmed.

Shine Bright ~
There is an energy that only you can bring. You have gifts that no one else has. Sharing that energy and those gifts isn’t just your opportunity, it’s your responsibility. We need what you have to give.

Show Up ~
Stand up. Speak up. Have an opinion. Collapsing and pulling the covers over your head only works in the shortest of terms. Do your best and show up.

Sometimes in the past year, I’ve emphasized one more than the others but in times of challenge, we need all three.

These six words have helped get me through times when I’ve felt afraid, but the more I practice them, the more it seems like they are a good choice no matter what’s happening.

You can do it.

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This week’s post is about intensity. More specifically, it’s about the benefits of mindfully choosing intensity. Even so, the topic can be a little, well, intense. So I offer the post in illustrations and color with a black cat on the side…

I know I find myself doing this. Avoid riding my bike because it’s easier to drive. Avoid doing another back bend because GAH! Do you do this, too? If so…Click here on the link to the research. It’s kind of amazing.

You can do that right now. Take a moment to take a deep breath before you keep reading. Okay, two more reasons to mindfully choose intensity.

To be clear, mindfully choosing intensity does NOT mean to beat yourself up, push yourself to exhaustion or anything like that. This is about feeling the urgency of intensity and allowing yourself to find the place where you are challenging yourself and able to keep breathing, stay balanced and present. Mindful intensity is an opportunity to offer kindness and strength to yourself. SO…

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You’re original, with your own path You’re original, got your own way – Leftfield, Original

Love like a signal you call Touching my body my soul Bring to me, you to meet me here – Moodswings, Spiritual High, Part I

Everything’s a remix. Everything. Everything is derivative. Even the things we think of as wildly original. Everything is an echo of what came before. Even you.

When I heard Queen Latifa’s 2004 album of standards, The Dana Owens Album (Dana Owens was her name before she Queened herself), my favorite track was Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. It’s an awesome song that I love to use in class. If you listen to Queen’s version, you’ll hear her talk at the beginning. Check it out.

Super cool. Not only was Queen Latifa creating a kickin’ cover of a classic, she was echoing Adderly while she was doing it.

When it comes to humor, I am totally low brow. Show me a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos of someone wiping out on a sledding run and I will laugh myself senseless. (A trait that was perhaps once endearing to Frank now is just an eye-roller.)

It stands to reason then, that a Christopher Guest mockumentary complete with ridiculous wigs and goofy songs about terriers and “armadillos in their trousers” is right up my alley. In Guest’s spoof on folk music reunions, A Mighty Wind, we meet the daft trio The Folksmen. Their series of 60s-era albums (covers complete with matching outfits and silly poses) include Ramblin’, Wishin’, Hitchin’, Pickin’.

Which cracks me up.

But then I learned about The Miles Davis Quintet. In 1956, in a dash to fulfill their contract with Prestige records so they could sign with Columbia, Davis’ first great quintet recorded four albums in two days. The names of those great albums? Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, Steamin.’

Suddenly, Guest’s joke about the lame folk trio is even funnier for its echo to one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time.

Every time you move your body, whether you are doing a lay-up or swinging a golf club or bustin’ a bad-to-the-bone dance move, you are echoing movement that has come before you. Someone taught you to walk, but no one walks like you. Someone can show you how to swing a tennis racket or do downward dog, but only you do it like you. There is the form of the movement and the form of your body and the form of this moment and the three come together in an alchemy of originality.

Every movement choice you make with your body, or for that matter, every thought you think and emotion you feel echoes in your bones. Especially choices you make regularly – always carrying your bag on your left shoulder, always running without stretching, always telling yourself that you aren’t good enough – will leave lasting impressions. Like the wind that blows and blows and blows to sculpt the pines, the choices we make echo into our future.

We have a similar impact on each other. Right now, you can think of a time when the words or actions of someone left a lasting impression of love and healing … or of pain and suffering. Just like your own choices, connections with others echo in our bodies and minds far into the future.

We are echoes reverberating with echoes. Original echoes. What is the tone you want to send into your future self and the future world?

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Yesterday, I wrote about spotting two gems in an old Nia notebook from a long-ago training with Carlos AyaRosas.

~ Can you let go of the need to check the outside world to see if you are doing okay?
~ Can you use your eyes to look out and stay in your body?

We use our eyes so much, so constantly, we are such visual creatures, that almost always we are unconscious about how we use them. Today, let’s look more closely at each of these eye-pearls from Carlos. The first pearl is connected with confidence and security (or lack thereof) and the second is about balance between self and other.

~ Can you let go of the need to check the outside world to see if you are doing okay?

My decision to teach mindful movement classes was both exciting and full-on terrifying. Getting up in front of people in tight pants and suggesting that they watch my body for an hour is a journey in vulnerability — even 15 years into the practice.

I still grapple with insecurity and self-consciousness but early on, I was awash in it. Worried that I wasn’t doing it right or that I wasn’t measuring up to more experienced teachers, I found myself checking out my students’ reactions to see if I was doing okay. I suspect I looked like Michael Scott, Steve Carrell’s character from The Office as my eyes darted from face to face. (In the show’s mockumentary format, Michael is forever glancing to the camera with wince-worthy awkwardness to see if he’s getting the laugh or praise or approval he’s after. Yep, that was me.)

It’s a natural human (albeit caveman-y) reaction to check in to see how what we say or do lands with others. We want to know that we’re still welcome to sit around the fire with our tribe and nibble on elderberry jerky with them. When I find myself doing it to distraction (mine and others), however, I know that I’ve lost my footing and am giving away my energy in an attempt to please my fellow cave folk.

It’s likely that you don’t get in front of people with pink polka dotted pants on and shake your daisy. It may be that your “checking the outside world” isn’t as painfully obvious as Michael Scott’s or mine. But notice when you feel yourself doing or saying something and then looking to see if you’re still accepted by the tribe. That’s a good time to feel your feet, stay in your body and breathe into your own self.

~ Can you use your eyes to look out and stay in your body?

Beauty can bring me to tears. When I watched the sun come up over Grand Canyon, the first time I saw the Rocky Mountains, and when my children were part of the Walker Upper Elementary School Olympic Ceremony each time I was a weepy mess. There are times when I can cry, feel deep emotion, and still stay connected to my body and sensation but often intensity causes me to vacate the premises. When I see something lovely or frightening or sad, it’s easy for me to ellipt into the other ~ whether it is mountain range or a beloved child ~ and lose myself entirely.

This is a shame, really, since the sensations that arise when I look at the world are helpful and informative. Feeling the tightness in my throat when I see cruelty or injustice tells me that I have something I want to say. Sensing the spaciousness in my heart and tingling on my skin when I see the light touching the towering Grand Canyon walls, tells me that I am part of something larger. All sensations, even painful ones, offer me an experience of aliveness.

What happens when you look out, can you stay connected to yourself, to your physical sensation in the moment?

It’s worth practicing on little things like the new blossoms in your garden or the sweet view from your window before you take on the big stuff like natural wonders of the world or middle school performances. However you do it, though, it’s worth practicing being connected with something or someone outside of you and staying connected to yourself.

How we use our eyes affects the physical body and movement — and it is largely about exchanging energy. Mindfulness around that exchange can help me stay balanced: both offer my energy and hold onto my own power.

This week, keep an eye on how you use your eyes.

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Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts. ~ Albert Einstein

My husband, Frank, and I are moving house. Last month we sold our beautiful and beloved work of Frank Art and next month, we will leave it. We are happy about the move and the process requires lots of letting go. It’s healthy and challenging and sometimes I have to put my head down on some packing materials.

Over the past few months, we’ve been purging the eddies in our house: the closets and cabinets and drawers where we mindlessly stick things until they stack up like a jumble of sticks and leaves on the swirling edge of a stream.

One of those eddies was my Nia and journal cabinet. This precious cabinet held every notebook and journal from every Nia training, meditation retreat, and workshop I’d attended in 15 years…although I’d almost never gone to it. When I swung open the cabinet, I felt my heart clench, “I NEED all of this. I don’t want to lose what I’ve learned.”

To placate my rising panic, I promised myself that I would collect all the wisdom in a Word document so I could keep the insights but let go of the dozens of spiral notebooks.

To my shock, when I read through my Nia notebooks, I didn’t feel the need to capture much at all (although I did scan a couple of doodles like the one above). Almost everything I either knew in my bones or wasn’t relevant. In the end, out of all those journals, I entered precisely two lines into the Word document. They came from a Blue Belt (the second level of training focused on communication, relationship, and intimacy) from my teacher, Carlos AyaRosas:

~ Can you let go of the need to check the outside world to see if you are doing okay?
~ Can you use your eyes to look out and stay in your body?

Ah. Yes. Right. This, I want to keep. There is more to learn here.

In yoga, it’s called the drishti or gaze. In the Hawaiian Huna tradition makia means “energy flows where attention goes.” In Nia, one of the 52 Moves is Head & Eye Movement. As highly visual creatures, the way we use our eyes affects body, mind, and emotions. Eyes are movers of energy and how I choose to use them has a direct connection to where my energy goes, how much I have available, and how much I give away.

Tomorrow, I’ll look more closely at Carlos’ two pearls. Keep an eye out for it.

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I can do Wheel Pose (Urdhva Dhanurasana). It’s no Cirque du Soliel or Yoga Journal rendering, but I can do it.

I can do Wheel, but unlike any other pose, I think about it before I get there. I know it comes at the end of class and that there may be one or three or more. Sometimes during the Warrior series, I think about it and wonder if I’ll have enough energy once we get into the floor series. Once we’re on the floor, I may be concentrating on Lizard (Utthan Pristhasana), but then I think, Ho Boy. We’ve still got Wheel to do.

When it actually is time to do Wheel, I set my feet near my hips, flip my hands around by my shoulders and… I reset my feet and tuck my hands in a little closer and… I take a breath and wiggle around a little and… I’m up.

Calm mind. Efficient body

We all have energy ~ physical, mental, emotional, life force energy. When it comes right down to it, life is all about directing that energy where we want it to go. When my mind runs around worrying and obsessing and my body wiggles needlessly, I’m leaking energy. If I’m leaking energy, I have less to focus on the things that matter.

It’s as if I’m paddling to get across a lake in a canoe that has a bunch of holes in it. If I actually make it across that lake, it will be a slow soggy slog. My relationship with Wheel is one leaky boat, let me tell you what.

Plugging the Leaks

The first step, as ever, is awareness. Do I realize I’m in my head fretting about how many Wheels Kelly is going to call? Do I notice that I’m fiddling and diddling around on my mat before I take the pose? Do I know that I’m clenching my jaw or holding tension in my hands or cracking my knuckles or biting my nails? The first step is to pay attention to how I’m draining myself or doing more than I need to. The first step in stopping up an energy leak is to notice that I have one in the first place.

The second step to plugging up energy leaks is to summon up my personal power to create a calm mind and an efficient body. This is where things may get a little tricky. Energy leaks are not only usually unconscious, but they are often long-held habits of body and mind. Even when I notice what I’m doing, I may be hard-pressed to stop doing it.

Intention and Curiosity

Plugging an energy leak is like changing any habit: set my intention to change, do my best and get curious about what happens. I might intend not to obsess about or wiggle into Wheel, and I find myself doing it anyway, or I may notice that I’m able to stay focused when I’m well-hydrated and practicing next to Gina. (Huh, check that out!) I might intend to spend 3 hours a week working on a new project and it might happen the first week but then I go back to my old habits after that. (Hmm, interesting. Maybe I need an accountability buddy.) If I want to eat less sugar, I might experiment with cutting back gently or going cold turkey, then I observe with curiosity and see what happens. (Urgh. Feel the sensation of the urge without acting on it.)

Calm mind. Efficient Body.

Directing my energy to what matters to me is what life is all about, and we all have leaks in our energy canoe. We all have ways that we fritter and wiggle and worry. If I’m squandering my energy on obsessing about things I can’t control or fiddling around with things that don’t matter, I’m wasting my most precious resource.

Calm mind. Efficient Body.

Plugging energy leaks is a life-long practice. Awareness of how I drain myself or do more than I need to, allows me to choose differently. Paying attention to the leaks and making choices around them is not only empowering but damned useful for doing what matters to you most.

Where is your energy leaking? In your mind? Your movement? Your life? Use the comments below to help each other recognize those sneaky places where energy escapes.

…annnnnnnd, I’m up.

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Everything I do is about creative connection. I respond to every comment, answer every question and reply to every email. Jump in to the comments below or reach out to sjmnia@gmail.com. We're stronger together.

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